Turn off the auto-disabling of touchpad and keyboard on Lenovo Yoga 3 14

Question

Problem

I'm using Lenovo Yoga 3 14 and when I open it at a certain angle (between 135 and 180 degrees) its keyboard and mouse becomes unresponsive / freezes. It is not a total freeze however - they unfreeze from time to time or repeat the last action hundred times.

How can I disable this feature which keeps disabling my input devices?

---

Details

General

The laptop operates well when open like this (~ 120 degrees).

The problems start when I open it at 135 or more degrees:

Here are the videos showing how it feels like to use keyboard and mouse then. It takes about 5 seconds before the keyboard and trackpad disablement kick in.

• The mouse lags and freezes back and forth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKynOx6Vdiw
• The keyboard freezes at some point and then repeats the last pressed key for a while before freezing (forever?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxMQrWHeEbo

Everything is back to normal when I open the laptop past 180 degrees (which is quite stupid as this is when I actually enter either tent or tablet mode).

The laptop itself does not freeze, just the keyboard and the mouse. The touchscreen works as well.

---

Is it OS-dependant?

I've experienced this behavior in:

• Ubuntu 16.10 and Ubuntu 17.04 in both Unity 7 and dwm
• FreeBSD 12-CURRENT in both the console and dwm

which suggests that it is either not that much OS-specific or both Ubuntu and FreeBSD have got some really bad drivers inside their kernels.

It is worth noting however that this issue happens much less often on FreeBSD. In fact, I can have my laptop as wide open as I want and the freeze happens only from time to time (once a week or so). In contrast to Ubuntu where it happens all the time even if the screen is only open at about 100 degrees.

---

Tracking it down with xev, xinput and xdotool

I've tried to track down the signal causing the machine to disable the touchpad and the keyboard using xev and others but it didn't show anything. The X server thinks that those input devices are fine and enabled all the time. This it not surprising as the freeze occurs when the X server is not running.

---

ACPI

acpi_listen does not print anything when it happens.

---

BIOS

There is no option in BIOS to disable this feature.

---

Disable using Lenovo pre-installed software

I guess that this is a Lenovo feature which ought to disable keyboard and touchpad when a user switches to tablet mode. Maybe on Windows this features is handled working fine (the last time I tried it wasn't really) or at least there is a way to disable it with some Lenovo pre-installed software. I have not found anything for Linux though.

---

Embedded Controller

I pressed the power button for 8 seconds in order to reset the EC but it didn't help. I've not tried yet to discharge the battery completely to reset the EC.

References:

• https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-hardware/lenovo-yoga-transition-issue-as-the-keyboard/c5f2eef2-f89b-47d9-89ff-15cf83fc1f7f
• https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-Yoga-Series-Notebooks/Reset-Embedded-Controller-Yoga-13/m-p/985409#M10535

Solution 1

The issue is mostly solved now:

• on Ubuntu 17.10 I just run:

  xinput disable "$(xinput -list | awk -F'[=\t]' '/ELAN/{print $3}')"
  

  and then everything just works™.

• on FreeBSD 12-CURRENT with drm-next-kmod (which brought support for the Intel graphics for that laptop), however, it is no longer an issue. Probably because of the fact that the touchscreen is non-responsive by default and I didn't bother to set it up.

---

Notes

• I didn't update BIOS as suggested in the other answer to this question.
• If someone comes up with a better solution to this problem, I'll be happy to consider marking it the accepted answer.

Solution 2

This is a common problem with these devices, from this website: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-Yoga-Series-Notebooks/Yoga-3-14-Keyboard-issues/td-p/2165832

Try updating your BIOS, this has worked for other people in similar circumstances.

Comments

[Mateusz Piotrowski]

I've not tried it. Partly because I couldn't find a tutorial / download site.

[HelloWorld]

pcsupport.lenovo.com/au/en/products/laptops-and-netbooks/… this should help mate.

[Mateusz Piotrowski]

As long as you're running Windows... :) Thanks anyway, I'll have to find a solution to that.

[HelloWorld]

oh not running windows :( sorry i couldn't be more help hope you find an answer